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Rashaad Penny: Priority Waiver Wire Target for Week 13

Rashaad Penny: Priority Waiver Wire Target for Week 13

We took a deeper look at Rashaad Penny earlier this season as a priority waiver wire add while he was the topic of heavy trade rumors right before the league’s trade deadline. He was never moved and kept his spot as a primary backup to Chris Carson with the Seahawks. One of the things I liked about Penny when we looked at him before was the potential for him to prove that he deserved more work and for him to potentially force an RBBC to form in Seattle.

While Carson has been a stud, his fumbling woes have become a serious problem and he put the ball on the ground twice in Week 12. Penny answered that by taking 14 carries for 129 yards and a TD on a season-high 49 percent of the team’s snaps. I know there are some salty Penny haters out there, but he has worked his way into being a top add once again this week. So, we will take a look again at a little background about Penny, what the state of the Seahawks offense currently looks like, and what we can potentially expect from Penny going forward.

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Player Profile

Rashaad Penny is a second-year back who came into the league last season after being selected in the first round of the NFL Draft. He played his college ball at San Diego State where he most-notably had a monster senior year carrying the ball 289 times for 2,248 yards and 23 TDs while adding a receiving line of 19-135-2. Beastly. That was easily the most rushing yards in NCAA that season and his TDs ranked second while he earned All-American honors and was the Mountain West Conference’s Offensive Player of the Year. He’s third all-time at SDSU with 3,656 rushing yards behind only Donnel Pumphrey and Hall of Famer Marshall Faulk. At 5’11” and 220 lbs he surely has the size of an all-purpose back.

As Samuel Gold of The Athletic explained in his in-depth review of Penny in the video below, the Seahawks surprisingly reached for Penny early in the draft as most people had him pegged as more of a second- or third-round draft pick. The team didn’t use him much at all last season as a rookie. He only handled 85 carries for 419 yards (4.9 YPA) with two rushing TDs. He finished third on the team in rushing yards behind workhorse Chris Carson and even behind Mike Davis. Penny did have one big breakout game last season when Carson was not active in Week 10 against the Rams where he carried the ball 12 times for 108 yards and a TD.

State of the Offense

The Seahawks are comfortably sitting behind the 49ers in second place in the NFC West at the moment. As far as their running game goes, they are still a run-heavy offense ranking fifth in attempts and sixth in rushing yards this season. While their volume isn’t quite as high for the passing game, Russell Wilson is continuing to play at an elite level.

The backfield has belonged to Carson all season despite his fumbling issues. He has handled the ball 208 times this season which ranks fifth in the league and run for 879 yards and four TDs. He is a special talent who has continually created yards beyond what was given to him each week. Penny hasn’t had enough of a role on offense outside of Week 12 to really base an opinion off of for this season outside of that one game.

Outlook

Seahawks coach Pete Carroll is continually one of the least trustworthy coaches in the league when it comes to believing his coach speak, but he has made it sound like we can expect Penny to be more involved than usual going forward.

I am still anticipating Chris Carson handling the bulk of the carries here, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see Penny get the official “start” in Week 13 by handling the team’s first carry to really drive the message home to Carson. I do think we need to expect a little bit more of a committee though going forward as well and if we see something along the lines of a 60/40 split, Penny would suddenly become a huge value on such a potent, high-volume offense.

When we look at our matchup calendar to see what the rest of season schedule looks like for Seattle, it’s really not too bad. The Eagles actually have been a tough run defense still this season and Penny just tore them up. The Vikings are up next in primetime on Monday Night Football this week who are another bad matchup on paper but they have given up 100-yard games to Damien Williams and Aaron Jones this season. A divisional tilt against the Rams is after that which is a spot where Carson ran for over 100 yards against them back in Week 5. Then you get a beautiful matchup against the Panthers who have been amongst the most generous in the league when it comes to fantasy points allowed to RBs in the heart of the fantasy playoffs and they end the fantasy season against the Cards, another solid matchup.

Penny is a must-stash at the absolute least and has some flex appeal immediately despite a less than ideal matchup and an unknown potential workload. If he can continue to capitalize on his opportunities, he could return RB2 value in those plus matchups for you, making him a solid addition to any fantasy roster heading into the playoffs.

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John Ferguson is a featured writer at FantasyPros. For more from John, check out his archive and follow him @FantasyFerguson.

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